Contentions

The expected nomination of San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro to lead the Obama administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development–a Cabinet-level post–has earned much attention from both sides of the aisle. Almost none of the commentary, however, has had to do with Castro’s qualifications for HUD. Most of it has had to do with the fact that the Democrats have been eyeing Castro as a possible vice-presidential candidate in 2016.

Democrats don’t seem to want to nominate a sitting mayor for vice president–too big a leap perhaps. This is especially true for Castro, because, as Allahpundit notes, the San Antonio mayor’s office is “a figurehead role,” without much responsibility or even a regular salary. In fact, San Antonio’s city manager reportedly receives a salary of $355,000, while Mayor Castro gets a $3,000 stipend plus $20 for every council meeting he attends. The San Antonio mayoralty is essentially the city government version of a department store greeter, except with fewer hours and less pay.

In addition to Allahpundit’s piece, Ben Domenech’s treatment of the issue in this morning’s Transom is worth reading. But I think there’s a point being missed here. Everyone is mentioning the fact that Castro is an ideal vice-presidential candidate because of his youth and his Hispanic heritage, as well as his connections to a red state. That is true. But he’s a perfect candidate for the Democrats for another reason. Allahpundit touches on it as a strike against him:

Essentially he’s a Latino Obama, except with much less experience. If he ends up as VP in 2016, he’d be the youngest veep since Dan Quayle (who had spent eight years in the Senate by the time he was sworn in) and indisputably the one with the thinnest resume, which means, if Hillary’s health goes south, the free world could conceivably be led circa 2018 by a guy whose main qualification was a two-year sinecure atop America’s housing bureau. But look at it this way. If they’re going to have a pure identity-politics candidate at the top of the ticket, why shouldn’t they also have one at the bottom?

Emphasis is in the original, but I think it’s worth emphasizing as well. Allahpundit says this as a kind of warning: if you thought Obama was unprepared for office, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Politico notes that Hillary Clinton was asked last week about the possibility of adding Castro to the ticket and that Castro has been asked before to join the Cabinet, so the Democrats have been looking for a way to elevate Castro for some time.

When you consider what Castro’s current day job entails, the question obviously arises: since no one the Republicans have ever nominated for the vice presidency comes close to being this inexperienced or unqualified–Sarah Palin was a governor, after all–does this make Democrats world-class hypocrites? Yes for the obvious reasons, but in the Democrats’ defense, they don’t see it that way, and there’s a logical process that leads them there.

To understand why this is, you have to remember how the Democratic Party, as a vehicle for American left-liberalism, approaches the task of governing. Yet again today the president’s press secretary said the White House learned about the Veterans Affairs scandal through the media–that is, those in the White House have no idea what’s going on in their own administration. This is a popular excuse for the president, because what he’s looking for is not responsibility but plausible deniability. Liberalism in a government this size is a recipe for disaster; Obama knows it will fail on his watch at a great many of its tasks. His desire is to somehow avoid blame for the array of inevitable failures of his administration.

The best description of the Obama presidency in recent memory is Kevin Williamson’s August essay for National Review, which paints Obama, accurately, as “the nominal leader for permanent bureaucracy.” The health-care law that Congress passed as ObamaCare, cruel and garbled as it is, resembles only in certain ways the ObamaCare the president is implementing. That’s because Congress passed the outlines of a law Obama then placed into the hands of his bureaucrats, such as the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

Democrats in Congress have tried, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to limit political speech in ways that would benefit liberal organizations and candidates at the expense of conservative ones. But they have often been stymied by the political process, because their ideas are unconstitutional. Enter the IRS, which targeted conservative groups, at the encouragement of high-ranking Democrats in the Congress and the White House, during the two election cycles before they were discovered after Obama’s reelection.

Democrats didn’t like the effect of the democratic process on their attempts to extensively regulate the private sector. So they created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an unaccountable bureaucracy to which the president made an unconstitutional appointment.

If your goal is to work within the confines of the system of checks and balances to influence the democratic process and produce transparent legislation and accountable lawmaking, you would want men and women of experience and proven capability. But the Democrats would intend for a Clinton/Castro team to be the public face of the bureaucracy, so they genuinely don’t expect Castro’s lack of experience and Clinton’s lack of accomplishment to get in the way. If there’s anything important that they really need to know, they’ll be sure to read the papers.